[Obituary] RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

[6Foot2]

Link: RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language • The Register

 

Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.

 

Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten was born in Worcestershire, England, on July 9, 1922. During the Second World War, she studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she got a BSc in mathematics in 1944. After graduating, she became a junior scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a research organization in Farnborough. Two years later she moved to Birkbeck College, first as a research assistant, and later a lecturer and then research fellow.

 

She also worked at the British Rubber Producers' Research Association (BRPRA), where she met and worked with mathematician and physicist Andrew Donald Booth, who later became her husband. After studying with X-ray crystallographer Professor J D Bernal – inventor of the Bernal Sphere – A D Booth was working out crystal structures using X-ray diffraction data, and finding the manual calculations very tedious; he built an analog computer to automate part of this.

 

In 1946, Britten and Booth collaborated at Birkbeck on a very early digital computer, the Automatic Relay Calculator (ARC), and in doing so founded what is now Birkbeck's Department of Computer Science and Information Systems.

 

The ARC was constructed in Welwyn Garden City, close to the BRPRA's headquarters. A D Booth designed it, but Kathleen Britten and her fellow research assistant Xenia Sweeting built the hardware. Bernal obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for Booth and Britten to visit the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, where Booth reported that only Bernal's friend John von Neumann gave them any time. Von Neumann explained his concept of what is now called the von Neumann computer architecture.

 

Booth and Britten returned to the UK and redesigned their calculator based around these ideas, leading to the ARC2 and in the process inventing the first drum memory to provide enough storage to hold both program information and data. Building the ARC2 from relays proved too much, so in 1948, Booth and Britten moved on to the Simple Electronic Computer (SEC) and then the All Purpose Electronic X-Ray Computer or APE(X)C. You can try out the APE(X)C in the MESS emulator.

 

The APE(X)C design was commercialized and sold as the HEC by the British Tabulating Machine Co Ltd, which eventually became ICL...

[elsiegee40]

Another significant female in the history of computing.

 

I have to admit that the Assembly Language I knew was very basic. Enough to do my job and little more. We had serious techy techies when I was in industry who probably knew Assembly better than English

[XiJ]

She had a lot to answer for. 68000 items when I was at uni!